Today host Scott Rennak sits down with Garnet Moore, Executive Director of the Climbing Wall Association. Garnet is one of the most connected and central figures in the North American climbing industry, overseeing both the CWA and their annual trade show, the CWA Summit. His origins in the manufacturing side have equipped him with a wide perspective on the climbing industry and climbing culture. During his tenure at CWA, he has steered the organization through the COVID pandemic, helping industry businesses regain their footing and go from surviving to thriving. Today, he’s leading the charge to preserve the culture of personal responsibility in our climbing facilities. Scott and Garnet talk about all these topics and much more.
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And thank you Devin Dabney for your music!
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
02:14 – Garnet’s Background
07:08 – The Growth of Climbing
13:01 – Industry Innovations and Advancements
20:33 – Industry Challenges
29:55 – Lawsuits, Public Land
34:11 – Personal Responsibility
37:15 – Freedom in Climbing Gyms
43:47 – Origin of the CWA
46:41 – Important Standards and Initiatives
49:53 – Volunteers
51:33 – Professionalism and Certifications
54:54 – Addressing Theoretical Problems
57:49 – CWA Coaching and Routesetting Programs
01:01:50 – How to Support the CWA
01:04:59 – Shout Outs
01:06:08 – Closing
Abridged Transcript
RENNAK: …Do you want to give our listeners a little bit of a rundown of your background, maybe what you’ve done in the industry or for CWA, how you found yourself sitting in the chair that you’re in today?
MOORE: …I started in the indoor climbing industry about 15 years ago. A little before that I was in the outdoor space in retail, working at a small retailer in Boston. I fell in love with climbing there and got out of the outdoor industry for a little bit, then back into the climbing industry, specifically working with Brewer Fitness, which is Treadwall Fitness now. I worked there for almost 10 years. We introduced a bunch of awesome new products around the Treadwall frame and also had a little hand in creating one of the first training boards that were existing at that time. We had a product called the Boulder Board still out there to this day.
And that was a really great early experience because I got exposure to the general fitness industry, military, climbing gyms—really anywhere that climbing fit in the world. It gave me a bit of a broader perspective than I think I would have had if I had just stayed in my own little outdoor climbing bubble. I also got to exhibit just tons and tons of trade shows—I don’t even know how many, probably over 100 trade shows over that time, which really let me see a huge amount of different perspectives on climbing, which I’m really thankful for.
When I was working with Brewer Fitness, I had a chance to participate with the ASTM, which is a standard charting organization that covers many different industries. At the time, their Amusements Group—F24, for any of my fellow nerds out there—was just starting to explore adopting standards for amusement-adjacent activities. Primarily one at that time was challenge courses and zip lines, and climbing was part of that discussion with that group. So, I got a chance to participate and share a task group for climbing walls in ASTM F24. And that’s where I really first started working closely with Bill Zimmerman, exhibited at CWA Summits really since the very beginnings, I think 2008—maybe not the very first one, but I think 2008 was my first one. So, I got to work with them a little more closely as a go-between with the ASTM group and what their work was doing…
…How do you tell the story of the growth of specifically artificial and indoor climbing? What does that look like to you?
Yeah, it’s a good question. I do really think that the outdoor aspects of climbing and indoor aspects are really intrinsically linked, nowhere else more so than the ethos and lifestyle aspects of it. And I think that’s why a lot of people get into indoor climbing businesses. Almost everyone I come across in the indoor industry, we really share a pretty strong set of what you call core values in the business world. And honestly, they’re also really the core values of the CWA. It’s being bold, being gritty, a lot of self-sufficient, DIY kinds of attitudes. And there’s a lot of positives that come with that. There are some negatives that come along with that as well. But I think that’s really the genesis of everything in climbing, seeing something you want to do and then figuring out how to do it. And part of that is the physicality and the training. Part of that’s the risk tolerance, your ability to see the positive that, “Oh yeah, that route’s going to go,” or “That’s a good place to build a gym”—whatever that dynamic is. And then really the grit and the perseverance to just push it through no matter what. It’s always such a tired analogy, “Oh, building a business is like climbing a route.” But there is a lot of overlap there. So, I think just from the industry’s founding, that was very evident.
People were chipping holds into brick walls in Boston or creating plastic holds overseas and bringing those to the U.S. In the 80s, people were figuring out how to set routes in Snowbird for the first time ever in an interesting way or seeing the development of speed climbing even. You start with this little nugget of an idea, and I think as climbers you see that dream and you just keep pushing at it. And you add in your physical efforts, your mechanical efforts, and then your attitudinal efforts around risk just to make that thing that you’re into an actual existing thing.
And in a lot of ways, I think we’re still in that, in the midst of that process in the industry where we’re constantly innovating, constantly growing. Gyms are getting bigger. We’re offering all sorts of different things that gyms have never offered in the past, whether that’s non-traditional climbing activities like your clip-and-climb facilities or ropes courses. About 20 years ago, bouldering gyms were a new, innovative idea. So, I think we’re still constantly pushing those boundaries and those efforts in the industry, and that’s something intrinsic to climbing, to be pushing those boundaries too.
[Do] you still see new innovations coming?…
Yeah…For a long time, in some ways, it was kind of easy to build a climbing gym. Yet it took a lot of work. So, maybe “easy” is too dismissive of a word, but if you had the right recipe, the right number of people, a decent enough location, even if that location was in a warehouse or shipping yard somewhere on the outskirts of town—as long as you were close enough, which 10, 15 years ago could mean an hour away from anybody, then you could make a pretty decent go of it without having to think about differentiating from competitors. This is one of the areas I think is really rife for innovation right now. Just differentiation, like, “Who am I as a climbing gym? Who’s my audience?”
And there’s a lot of room to play there that we just haven’t seen really explored in our industry yet. Going back to bouldering, it was an innovative idea just to do bouldering, because who’s going to want to just boulder? But that’s obviously come and gone as a question if it ever needed to be a question. Right now, you could ask similar questions: “What does it look like if a climbing gym has no kids? What does it look like if a climbing gym charges $500 a month for membership, like Equinox or a country club? What does it look like if a gym doesn’t have memberships and it’s only day passes?”
I think that’s where we’re going to see the next wave of people playing with the business model, almost more than some of the physical product innovations we’ve had. I’m really hoping that we see a massive increase in awareness around routesetting’s value in climbing. I think climbers and climbing gym customers are becoming more sophisticated and they’re noticing the differences that all of us industry veterans would notice the first time we walk into a gym, like, “Oh, those holds are 20 years old,” or “Oh, these holds are more competition style.” I think our customers are getting better educated, probably largely through social media and just having more content available around routesetting. So, I would love to see innovations in routesetting and, overall, a rise in the quality of routesetting in the industry…
…What are some of the challenges you see as a facility, as a culture? …
…It does seem like culture is changing. I don’t think the general public has the best understanding of what the sport of climbing is or what climbing gyms are. So, we play a huge role in shaping people’s perception about climbing. At the same time, though, we’ve got these countervailing influences of what people see in movies, what they see on the news, and what they hear about climbing—the periphery. And I don’t think we have a universal agreement right now on what the right answer is or…what climbing is.
We can all kind of communicate our own different take on it. But I think getting to a point where we have a bit of a more holistic approach to telling new climbers, telling the general public, telling potential regulators what we’re doing and why it’s so important—I think this is a big opportunity in the future, but a big challenge right now because we’ve got to get that consensus in place. And that’ll be a really important piece that I can speak to outside of the CWA. Just to me personally, one of the big reasons I’m doing the job I’m doing and really promoting climbing as much as I can is I think it’s a positive influence on really anyone’s life.
Especially in the U.S., we have a general culture that’s a bit more inclined toward embarrassment and shame, and maybe not pushing boundaries as much. Anyone who has the chance to introduce someone to climbing for the first time gets to see people break that mold a little bit. That more risk-averse and kind of anxious attitude toward everything seems, to me, to be growing. I think climbing is a good way to combat it, but it’s also a growing challenge for the industry. People are more risk-averse than they’ve ever been, and that makes it that much harder to communicate to customers and to the general public who should be responsible for what in a climbing gym.
…Some facilities already have this that are trending toward the clip-and-climb, where there are attendants who clip you in and check your harness and you don’t have that freedom. It doesn’t feel like you’re at the crag anymore. You’re getting watched. Maybe there’s no bouldering in that facility because it’s just an unacceptable risk to hit the ground every time. There’s a vision where we don’t get that freedom anymore in our climbing gyms. I know a lot of climbing gym owners who really care about that. So, could you talk about that a little bit. And maybe this is a segue into some of the things that CWA does to help that?…
This ties perfectly into the work of the CWA. I like to think a lot of times that the CWA is really one of the organizations that’s preserving climbing. Climbing’s slippery slope is a little bit of a fallacy. But in any one of these decisions, you can start sliding down that slippery slope to get to the extreme—you’re talking about a ropes course approach, or what you might see at a clip and climb place, where someone’s helping you put your harness on, they’re clipping you into every auto belay. There’s close to zero personal responsibility. There’s just this kind of participation in the experience rather than performing the actual activities.
And personally, I think that experience, that climbing—the experience of managing your own equipment, your own risk acceptance and tolerance in a climbing gym—is a fundamental part of the sport of climbing. If you take away people’s ability to be responsible for their own risks, then it starts to become something else other than climbing. Maybe you could get some similar physicality, but you wouldn’t get all of the aspects of the sport that you need to perform, especially if you were to go outside. So, I think there could be some big implications for taking too much personal responsibility away from the participants in an indoor climbing activity.
So, what the CWA does—because I don’t think there’s a lot of awareness actually in the industry of what we’re here for or what we do on a day-to-day basis—it speaks to this question. Our job is really to help people connect, talk about things like this with fellow owners, help provide guidance where appropriate on questions like this, and to create a set of best practices and benchmarks that people can use to measure their own operations against. And all of that really comes from the climbing community. The CWA is a nonprofit, standards-writing trade association, and [the professionals on] our board of directors are all volunteers who own gyms, own climbing manufacturing companies, or work in the industry in some capacity, providing other services. Underneath our board of directors, we have a huge number of committees, and all those committees are made up of climbing gym owners and managers and coaches and routesetters—people who work day to day in the industry. So, it’s one of the things that makes it awkward to be on a call like this for me, because I get to talk about climbing all day and enjoy all of the input from these people and help to collate it and curate it a little bit. But really, everything that we do is from the community, just attempting to answer these really tough questions of what are the best practices for climbing gyms at the end of the day, and what can we do to dance on that line appropriately of personal responsibility and facility responsibility in a way that doesn’t erode important aspects of the sport of climbing.
